After years of broken promises and failed development deals, a desolate stretch of Grand Avenue in the West Grove may be rebuilt with housing as a trio of investors seeks to capitalize on plans put in place more than a decade ago by the City of Miami.
The Bimini Block project would add 176 market-rate rental apartments and 26,000 square feet of street-level shops and restaurants to the neighborhood, on 2.4 acres of vacant land on Grand Avenue between Plaza and Hibiscus Streets.
The project’s developers went public with their plans on June 20 at a hearing before the city’s Urban Development Review Board. The review board endorsed the design of the five-story building with only minor changes, in a vote that moved the project forward.
The plans are being welcomed by some, although not without concern, given the pace of gentrification now affecting the historically Black neighborhood.
“It’s not altogether bad in my opinion because Grand Avenue is such a toilet right now,” said Andy Parrish, a West Grove developer and neighborhood advocate. But, he added, “it is going to continue the gentrification of the West Grove.”
Others believe the project could be a tipping point for other development on the barren blocks that connect the West Grove to downtown Coconut Grove. “The dam has burst, and it’s not going to stop,” said J.S. Rashid, a West Grove developer.
Once plans are complete and the project is permitted, construction of the five-story building could begin in two years, with a targeted completion date in late 2027.
The project is a joint venture between Abbhi Capital, a Miami investment firm, and two Coconut Grove developers, Grant Savage and Peter Gardner of Silver Bluff.
The same partners are building the 46-unit Elemi residential development on Thomas Avenue and Margaret Street behind the Coconut Grove Farmer’s Market. Both projects are Opportunity Zone projects, which provide certain tax benefits to the developers.
Sankesh Abbhi, founder of Abbhi Capital, is listed as the manager of Grove Bimini Nassau QOZB LLC, which acquired the vacant block in 2022 for $18.76 million from GV Bimini LLC, which is managed by Gardner. Silver Bluff Development is the developer.
Gardner has a long history with the development site. In 2011, Gardner secured a Major Use Special Permit (MUSP) from the City of Miami to develop six contiguous blocks on Grand Avenue between Plaza and Margaret Streets.
Each of the six blocks was given a Bahamian name – including the Bimini block, where the project is slated to rise – in recognition of the neighborhood’s Bahamian roots.
Gardner’s development plans stalled but the MUSP lived on, allowing Abbhi and Silver Bluff to streamline the approval process for the five-story mixed-use project.
Jimmy Sinis, director of design at Silver Bluff, said project designers looked to the 2002 Grand Avenue Vision Plan when styling the five-story building. “We went to that for inspiration,” Sinis said. “We spent quite a bit of time trying to get it right.”
The Caribbean-style design by Arquitectonica affirms the neighborhood’s Bahamian roots and favors pedestrians with an open plaza on Grand Avenue, a covered walkway, and eight ground-floor apartments with a landscaped buffer on Thomas Avenue.
The building’s façade, with its blend of balconies and awnings, it’s broken roofline and street-level stone cladding also add depth and variety to the overall look of the project.
“We feel this is the right project for the area,” Savage told the Spotlight.
The project’s parking garage with 317 spaces will be tucked inside the building and wrapped on the outside by the residential units – a mix of one, two, and three-bedroom apartments ranging in size from 700 to 1,420 square feet.
“We felt wrapping it (the garage) with the residential units had a better feel,” Savage said. The building’s loading zones have also been moved to the interior.
Along Thomas Avenue, where the project backs up to a neighborhood of single- and multi-family homes, plans call for a 25-foot landscaped buffer of mature trees, some of which will be relocated from elsewhere on the property.
Cars will enter and exit the property on the two side streets, Plaza and Hibiscus, to encourage pedestrian traffic on Grand Avenue, where the retail component will be centered. The main lobby will be on the corner of Thomas Avenue and Hibiscus.
The ground floor commercial space is likely to feature both restaurants and retail stores, Savage said, although nothing is locked in yet.
That retail potential is promising for some, even though the site has a complicated history. Dozens of existing homes in the six-block area were demolished and residents displaced starting in 2005 to make room for new development that never happened.
“The City of Miami has allowed developers to tear down housing without consideration for the residents who were displaced,” Grove Rights and Community Equity (GRACE) says on its website. GRACE is a community organization that advocates for equitable economic development and preservation of the West Grove’s history and culture.
“Our political leadership has never set any standard or come up with any policies that would result in some form of equity for the long-term stakeholders,” said Rashid, the West Grove developer.
For Rashid, those standards would include a minimum threshold of 15% affordable housing in residential projects. This would benefit not only low-income residents but also businesses that need employees who can afford live locally, he said.
“You just can’t have all the big stuff on top and no foundational support system that is woven in,” he said. “You have to meet the needs of all levels of the community.”
Miami is one of the nation’s least affordable housing markets. In June of this year, the median price of a one-bedroom rental in Miami was $2,770, according to the latest monthly Miami Metro report by national rental listing company Zumper.
By comparison, the median price of a similar rental was $2,450 in Coral Gables, $1,850 in Hialeah, and $1,520 in Homestead.
The report did not provide a breakout for Coconut Grove, but Apartments.com recently cited rental rates of $2,535 to $2,901 for apartments above the Aldi’s grocery store at Platform 3750 on the corner of Douglas Road and South Dixie Highway.
Given the cost of construction, Savage said he and his partners have no plans to include affordable or workforce housing in the project. But, he said, the partners may develop other properties on Grand Avenue with housing priced below market, if they can secure the right funding – namely grants – to make that work economically.
Savage said the partnership had not worked with GRACE to vet the Bimini Block project, but had worked with the organization on another project – a proposed hotel development on Charles Avenue across from the historic E.W.F. Stirrup House.
For that project, Silver Bluff will make a $150,000 contribution to Rebuilding Together Miami-Dade, a nonprofit that helps low-income homeowners complete needed home repairs and renovations, when the hotel project is greenlighted by the City of Miami.
My memory may be a bit fuzzy after so many years of back and forth with Grand Ave development, but I thought at one time there was a 3 story limit on building height and developers and the City reached an agreement to allow 5 stories if the developer provided a certain number of affordable housing in their building. Anyone recall that?
“It’s not altogether bad.” Which means it could be a helluva lot worse now, but should and could have been a remarkable architectural and cultural testament to what is possible when elected leaders listen to their residents and then try to do their best to act upon what they hear. Just go to the Spotlight’s Community Voices to see what the West Grove (now Little Bahama) residents wanted when they asked for help over two decades ago.
I give Gardner/Savage/Abbhi credit for at least giving a significant nod to the Bahamian neighborhood where they are building on a street that’s only 75 ft wide and with frontage lots only 90 ft deep. It’s never been easy, which is why the 2002 Visage Plan proposed mainly 2 and 3 story structures like Miami Lakes, so there could be both adequate parking and green space for the local shops and apartments to be built on Grand. That became impossible once land prices soared from under $20 psf to now over $250 psf. You have to go higher and denser.
At least this new development stays to 5 stories as Miami 21 allows, even though there’s no “affordable housing” included (Don’t you just hate that meaningless term that politicians and developers so love to throw about?), Plans for Grand Avenue going back to the former zoning code’s “Unlimited height” would have allowed unobstructed views of the Bay from the 6th floor up, and those views would definitely never have been “affordable” for all but a very few West Grovites. And at least this proposed new development doesn’t try to palm off something a previous developer and their attorney called “Bahamian Modern Architecture.”
The real villain in this decades-long tale of missed opportunities to do something both right and magical is the City Of Miami’s failure to do anything but neglect this historic community’s Vision Plan painstakingly crafted from a solid week of work by residents back in 2002 under the leadership of the University of Miami’s Center for Urban and Community Design led by the late Samina Quraeshi and her husband Richard Shepard. Hundred’s of residents. The only fruit that resulted was the Neighborhood Conservation District (NCD 2) which is largely ignored even now by the City’s Building Department, or “settled” by the City’s Legal Department when aggrieved neighbors try to sue for demolition as they did on Day Avenue. “Oops” is neither an apology nor justice.
I could go on but I must have gotten something in my eye.
If politics had allowed the expansion of the OMNI Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) to expand to the West Grove, the financial incentives would have been available to subsidize the inclusion of affordable units in this and other projects.
Among the comments that I made is that development is needed, the project is very sensitive and compliant to the style of development that Grove residents have called for. The issue there has been no policies or efforts to include previously displaced area residents. We can, we must incentivize the developers to include mixed income units in these projects. They must be sweet enough that they cannot refuse. It is the various levels government’s responsibility to do so.
This would be greatly beneficial stabilizing our mercantile sector as well as fulfilling the unmet needs of the neglected and displaced residents.